The Not-So Secret Diary of Sirius Black: Year 7
by Amalynne Olivier
Summary: The widely requested sequel to The Ever Secret Diary of Sirius Black. Marauder's Era: Year 7.


Disclaimer: JK Rowling will own everything, forever. Peace.

_Author's Note: This fanfiction is the sequel to a long-running piece called The Ever Secret Diary of Sirius Black, chronicling a sixteen year old Sirius' 6th year and all the madness that occurred. After many requests I started to work on Year 7, and I think, though the tone is a little darker and slightly more mature, that there will be the same comedic and seriously Sirius feel. Please enjoy and please leave your feedback, I always like to know what my readers are thinking and take their suggestions into consideration._

_Here's what's new: Shorter chapters, darker plot. I debated increasing the rating to M, but I don't foresee an immediate reason._

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**Chapter 1: Tosser's Tavern**

Hermione had been crying again, her sniffling wails going long into the night. Throwing a pillow over his head and focusing on the dingy cream colored canvas of the old tent was all Harry could do to maintain a level of sanity... not that there was much to be had anymore. Ever since Ron's departure evenings had been like this. In the day Hermione would feign a composed sort of purpose, her nose and eyes red from late night weeping. It was an insufferable kind of situation with no reprieve... until Harry remembered it...

Under piles of dirty clothing and yellow-paged books, lodged inconveniently at the very bottom of the trunk, between a History of Magic and a few vintage pin-up mags that had been found in Sirius' old bedroom, was the little navy notebook. With a yank and a groan, Harry freed the article from the trunk. He hovered bright wand light over the dingy, leather bound book, it's pages discolored and corners worn, soiled with the oils of much handling. It had been Remus' gift to him, a token after Sirius had died...

"When you're ready, this could be a way to know him as you never did," Remus had said, a haunting sadness in his eyes. "The past can be a painful place, but it helps us understand the present, and prepare for our future..."

Pages had been torn out of the binding, about fifteen or twenty, when Harry ran his fingers across the bumpy ridges, letting the journal fall open... It was empty, a charm to be sure, one to hide the contents and whatever secrets Sirius felt he had to hide in his youth. There were times Harry hadn't wanted to know, he hadn't been ready. Whatever these pages contained, there was something too fresh and too real about them, like a dream so painfully real that waking unearths a fresh gouging sting. With Ron gone and his company merely the howling wind outside the tent, and Hermione's sniffles within it, Harry was ready for the company of new memories... even if they were old to someone else.

On a little yellow sticky note in Remus' neat script displayed the words, "Padfoot, the Grim." Harry had never asked what the book was, he hadn't wanted to know at the time, even still he was unsure what he would find here. Remus had described it as an anthology of memories, not so different from a diary Harry had once had the privilege of experiencing his second year at Hogwarts. That notion set him ill at ease, admittedly, but it had been Sirius'... There were many disappointments in stories of the past, Dumbledore's legacy had been tarnished by tales spun true and biting... what was there to be found of Sirius? Biting his lip, Harry scrounged for a quill in his trunk, splattering ink in his anxiousness before he finally, shakily, put quill to parchment, writing, "Padfoot, the Grim."

There was a sensation that coiled in his stomach, yanking him forward into the pages, a white blinding brilliance sucking him into the sensation of reliving a memory.

**August 22nd, Summer before 7th year:**

The world was creaking and jostling and fluorescent lights flickered and died, their high pitched whine only part of the symphony of sounds in the London metro. A dark haired boy sat crammed between a dour-faced old woman with two massive bags of groceries on either knee, and a erratically dressed and presumably homeless blind man, his eyes glassy and staring blankly ahead. The dark haired young man seemed absorbed as he scribbled away at the journal in his lap, his head bowed down to hide his face. He was wearing a black t-shirt and faded blue jeans, filling out his clothing with lean muscle... he looked like he could have passed for a beater, Harry considered briefly. With a metallic screech, the train skid to a stop, jostling passengers forward as the doors hissed open. Tossing the hair out of his eyes, Sirius came to his feet, tucking the journal in his back pocket as he sidled out of the train. Without moving his legs, Harry felt propelled after him, the memory shuttling him along.

The metro station smelled awful, the dingy light casting reflections upon the puddles of polluted rainwater that poured down from the stairs leading up to the street. It was late afternoon, the sky had gone gloomy and purple blue as clouds closed in on the city. Discotheques glowed neon light down on Sirius's face as he maneuvered his way through the streets, hands secured in his pockets as light rain dusted his head and shoulders. He was heading into a seedy side of town Harry could say he felt less than comfortable about, the streetlights weaker, sparse, where storefronts sat boarded up with plywood and iron grates. At the end of a particularly lonely corner, Sirius turned into a brick building with a a neon green sign hanging just above a cloudy glass, graffiti-marked door. The words flickered in and out of sight, for one second reading, "Grocer," and the next "Tosser's Tavern." Despite his hesitation, the memory propelled Harry after Sirius, the questionable glass door opening to a dimly lit and rustically bohemian lounge. Black lacquered tables and red leather booths lined the perimeter of the lounge. Ambient emerald lighting accented the space, each table set with a green glass genie lamp, filtering incense and light around the faces of the artistically flamboyant clientele. Sirius was out of place, amongst the hoards of hooka smoking, tattoo covered, finger snapping "artistes," their eyes languid and entranced towards the center stage. Under a lantern, swirling with the glow of fairy light, a petite brown-haired witch sat on a spindly little stool, spouting out some deep and lyrical poetry.

A smile at Sirius' lips deepened into a smirk as he fell into the shadows against the opposite wall, his arms crossed over his chest as he listened. The reading ended with the kind of spontaneous abruptness that artists love so and the tavern erupted in snaps, claps and whistles, the little witch blushing richly as he skipped off the stage. Her chestnut brown hair hung over one should in a loose braid, entwined with white ribbon, and she wore a casual long sleeveless black dress that clung to her slender form like a glove. She had embellished her eyes with some deep smokey gray makeup that made her brown eyes shine almost a red in the light. She had approached the bar at the far end of the room, but a tap to her shoulder had brought her to whiz around.

"What the hell are you doing here?" she glared at Sirius, her brows narrowed severely.

Sirius slung an arm around her shoulder as she rolled her eyes, but did not remove him. "I said I'd come, didn't I?"

"Yes, after I asked you not to. It's terrible, all of it, I'd rather you didn't hear it," she grumbled as she came to seat herself on one of the bar stools.

Sirius followed suit, smirking as he ordered them two shots of Fire Whiskey. "I'm trying to show support."

"You're trying to get in my pants," she corrected with a quirked brow, sighing into a laugh as she gazed up in thought.

"I'm trying to be a supportive friend," Sirius corrected, clinking his little shot glass against hers before he threw it back briskly.

She did not touch her drink but folded her arms, looking him over skeptically. "Really?"

"Really!" he insisted, "Look, Elle, what did we agree at the end of term? We said we'd work on getting along and that's what I'm trying to do."

"So you can get in my pants," Elise said coolly, her eyes unremitting in their doubt.

A slight sneer arched on Sirius' lips. "No, so I bloody can survive next year without wanting to kill you. And now that you and Remus are so damn chummy, I have to survive you, Collier, so I'm trying, alright?"

Elise pursed her lips. "You have an awful way of trying to be friendly," she said as she turned to swivel off her stool.

Sirius grabbed her by the arm, however, and she stopped to glare at him more closely. "If you want to be mates you have to start by not coming to these things. I think you like coming just to piss me off."

Sirius laughed, steering Elise to look at him directly. "Look, I know things have been... awkward and all, but we're too much alike not to be friends, at the very least."

"Oh, just because we can both turn into something relatively canine you think we're alike?" Elise scoffed with a whispering hiss.

"You're brilliant, Elle, to do that on your own, it took three of us working day and night for years to figure it out, you're a bloody genius... And we were close to something there, you know, and it just seems like a waste to just let it all go."

Elise looked into his gray eyes, her angry breaths slowing as she sighed out, "Just-just don't come to my readings anymore, promise?"

"Why?" Sirius smirked, "you wrote raunchy ones about me?"

She nearly pushed him off his bar stool as she cried out with shocked amusement, throwing back the shot he'd ordered for her. "Honestly, you are the biggest tosser here! C'mon then,walk me home."

Harry was throttled out of the memory, his head spinning and feeling light and full of helium. The diary lay in his lap, a messy, blotching script spreading across the page for the date: August 22nd.

_The world is kinder to you when you're a dog, women are kinder, especially. They throw themselves at you, rubbing behind your ears and cooing like an infant... it would be smothering if the whole thing didn't facilitate such a good view of certain voluptuous assets-I have hormones, sue me. I spent the day as a dog, it was an off day and I don't have anything particular planned besides pissing Elle off this evening. She's been putting up with an aunt in Hampstead, a convenient stone's throw away from my current locale. London has been good to me these past few months. Alphard's Hampstead loft is a little too fifty-year-old woman, begonias, and paisley for me, but at least it's my own place. There are some downsides, gardening gaffers, for instance, who greet me with more enthusiasm and talkative curiosity than I can stomach (old people never stop talking), and then the poncey dog walkers, strangling their teacup mutts on leashes with their noses held so high I bet they've seen up god's arse... But it is tolerable after dark and if my companion is tipsy enough she'll hardly notice the "springy spring" welcome mat. It's a hell of a thing, in an awful way, changing greetings all the time, always cheesy and obnoxiously happy._

_Elle seems to think the mat has a knack for alliteration, I think it just has a knack for being annoying .. and it's stuck there too, won't come up... probably just to take the piss at me. If James saw it he'd laugh himself sore, it's a lucky thing he's been too Evans-preoccupied to visit. It'll give me time to make the place more bachelor appropriate. The hours I've been working at the Leaky Cauldron have preoccupied much of my time... I've taken up a part-time post as not to die of complete boredom. At the start of summer I encouraged the owner to some family time in Scotland-but he's left an opinionated shrunken head to look after me-and thankfully, also to spot out attractive women. We've got a system going that has lent me a very amicable summer._

_I just finished up a shift, actually. I like to take muggle transit because they're all so lovably dopey and interesting, and occasionally someone relatively decent looking will make eyes at me, and muggle or not, a date is a date. The stops are long and it lets me think, or write, as I'm doing at present (there is a rank-scented bloke to my left, who I could have sworn was blind, but he appears to have a serious snooping problem... and I don't appreciate the fact that he's been reading what I write as I go along-or that he's been pointing out grammatical errors... although, it was helpful of him to recommend a hyphen for "rank-scented")._

_I haven't seen much of anyone this summer besides Elle, she's the only one confined to London like me... even though she seems completely indifferent to my company, figure that. The company I've kept hasn't been regular or substantial and mostly included drunken twenty-somethings with all the usual curves and hormonal urges. It's been fabulous and terrible at the same time. I try not to tell Elle too much about all that, it's just a little tricky these days, seeing as our romantic attempt sort exploded miserably in our faces-this was mostly my fault, but she definitely owns some of the blame. I've considered it extensively and I think that, for now, we just don't work... not that way, not a as a "thing," a couple, or whatever. We work as just, I don't know, "us"... and lately "us" has been that mixture of awkward yet pleasant, the sort that you're not sure if you should hug or not, because maybe you're abominable as lovers and better off as friends._

_See, I don't want a girlfriend, and she doesn't want to be "cheap," so we're basically at an impasse... one that includes swapping books, evening coffees and people watching, and general sexual tension that's gradually turning me mentally canine. And it's gotten worse too because she's grown more comfortably snarky around me. I don't know what we are, maybe we're friends now. I'm not really going to harp over it._

_And don't ask me why I'm noncommittal, it's simply because domesticity is banal and boring and life should be so much more interesting than just two damn people their whole lives until they die. No one questions it and anyone that does is "selfish" and "sightless." They say I'll come back to the light and see it all clearly and know that I was supposed to choose the regular formula: a house, a wife, kids, a stable ministry-type job... a world that is strictly magical or muggle and not a beautiful blend of both. I'm not saying it doesn't work, that it's not right for some people, but its not right for me... and I don't think it's right for Elise either... that's why, I guess, she's perfect._

_-SB*_

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_A/N: Thank you, readers, let me know your thoughts. All the best!_

_-Ama_


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